Failure to qualify to the 2014 World Cup would cost the Football Association
£100 million, warns an expert

England failing to qualify for the World Cup could cost the Football Association £100 million in additional revenue, an expert in the economic impact of sporting events has warned.

Roy Hodgson’s men must win their final Group H game against Poland on Tuesday to be certain of reaching the finals next summer and avoid the prospect of missing out on football’s biggest event for the first time in 20 years.

Although the FA has deals with key commercial and media partners locked in until 2018, which include only small bonus payments for World Cup qualification, Professor Tom Cannon of Liverpool University believes not reaching Brazil could deny it new sources of funding and make it less attractive when existing sponsorship and broadcast contracts come up for renewal.

“For English football, not qualifying would be pretty horrendous,” he said. “What you’re almost certainly going to find is that sponsors would be tempted to focus their sponsorship expenditure elsewhere.”

The former head of brand strategy at Nationwide, which ended its 11-year partnership with England in 2010, said the weeks during and just before a World Cup was worth more to a sponsor than the entire two-year qualification period.

Peter Gandolfi said: “It’s almost the whole reason a sponsorship comes to light, to be perfectly frank with you. Therefore, when they don’t qualify, it really hits the sponsor big time.”

Cannon predicted that failure to reach Brazil would also see ticket sales plummet for England’s matches in 2014 and cast doubt on a potentially-lucrative pre-World Cup trip to the United States.

All this prompted Cannon to predict a potential loss of revenue of around £100 million for the FA. As well as this, he said individual England players stood to lose up to £10 million in endorsements if they missed out on the tournament.

“One of the team could probably add £5 million-£10 million to his income over the next year or two if he’s in a World Cup team and the team does reasonably well,” Cannon said. “If they don’t then the downside happens.”

Failure to qualify would be felt most keenly in the wider economy, with the British Retail Consortium having claimed that reaching the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was worth £1 billion to the country.

Cannon said: “The better we do, the more impact that will have from bar sales to restaurant sales to merchandising sales to season tickets for clubs next season.”